The New York Board of Rabbis has claimed its members were not invited to a roundtable discussion that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani held with the city’s prominent rabbis on Monday.
A spokesperson for the board, which represents more than 750 rabbis across religious denominations in the New York area, told JNS it was baffled by the exclusion, with one rabbi calling it “classic Mamdani”.
“I don’t know who he went through,” they said. “He didn’t go through us. We had nothing to do with it.”
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told JNS that he was not invited to the meeting.
“My initial reaction is it’s classic Mamdani,” he told JNS. “He has no interest in the serious work of rebuilding his relationship with the Jewish community.
"He wants to feign interest in the Jewish community, but is only ready to meet with Jews whom he picks and chooses as ideologically comfortable.”
"Turns out, even they are fed up with him,” he added, referring to reports that the meeting was a tense affair, with attendees urging the mayor to tone down his anti-Israel rhetoric.
Rabbi Etan Tokayer, president of the Rabbinic Council of America, told JNS that he too had not received an invitation.
“Absent any context, I cannot say whether I would attend had I been invited,” he said.
Tokayer told JNS that he wrote a letter several months ago to the mayor’s Jewish liaison after it was reported that Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, had liked a number of strongly anti-Israel social media posts in the past.
“It was a strong but thoughtfully balanced note,” he told JNS. “I received no reply.”
Those who did attend the meeting, though, recounted a robust but respectful conversation.
"There was no tiptoeing around the elephant in the room,” said Rabbi Jonathan Leener of Prospect Heights Shul.
"The mayor’s comments have ramifications and he needs to be aware of how in the current climate, that just adds to the temperature and creates an environment that I think a lot of Jews feel vulnerable in."
It comes after Mamdani admitted he did not have the authority to, as he had previously promised, arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu under the International Criminal Court’s outstanding warrant should he visit New York.
However, his announcement drew condemnation from Jewish groups after he, in the same video, referred to Netanyahu as a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people”.
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